Robert DeLuca, the president of the Group for the East End, and State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. have declared war on the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, and, at least in my opinion, rightfully so.

The war is a legal proceeding known as an Article 78 in which they charge the Z.B.A. is violating a section of the town’s open space law governing “subordinate, customary, and accessory uses,” and the state’s Open Meetings Law, which is understood to require a quorum of all municipal agencies and committees to deliberate publicly. 

What makes this of more than routine interest is not whether the 118 housing units and 18-hole golf course proposed for the Pine Barrens, the vast open space that protects a critical aquifer, would harm the environment, but the law requiring public deliberations, which has been endorsed by the state committee on open government and confirmed by the courts. 

Instead of meeting to hash out opinion, the members of the Z.B.A. have decided to follow seemingly arrogant advice from the Southampton Town attorney, James Burke, who thinks it is okay for them to be polled by email. Adam Grossman, the chairman of the Z.B.A, has confirmed this procedure.

The issue was a luxury resort being developed in East Quogue by the Discovery Land Company of Arizona. An assistant Southampton Town attorney, Kathryn Garvin, has said the policy — “polling members individually by email rather than holding public discussions on applications and questions before the board” — is legal. However, from where I sit, it violates the state’s Open Meetings, or Sunshine, Law, which guarantees that official business be conducted in an open and public manner.

A number of organizations and environmentalists have joined the lawsuit, including Richard Amper, the executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, and Albert Algieri, president of the East Quogue Civic Association, along with a number of East Quogue residents.

I believe environmental concerns should be a priority in governmental decision-making, but what is threatened here is an overriding state law. Allowing the members of municipal bodies to decide if and when to follow the law is tantamount to chaos. Regardless of how big an environmental threat this development would be, the procedure by which the Southampton Town Z.B.A. has shut out the public is an even more serious public threat.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, our dog-eared Webster’s dictionary tells us, “government by the worst men.”

I had been thinking along the lines of caca, and cacastocracy, and hadn’t, as it turned out, been far off the mark, but for some reason, perhaps because I remain an optimist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, I tend not to agree with the columnist’s dour outlook for the year 2019.

Trump, he seems to think, when it all comes down, will, like a wounded wild boar (my analogy), run roughshod over everyone, over the Constitution, the rule of law, common decency, all that.

Will there be sages the likes of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, and Judge John Sirica (he could also have included in that number Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, and Peter Rodino) of Watergate fame to stand up to him, and, in so doing, reassert the equilibrium that our system of checks and balances intends?

Or will we be thrown — a likelihood in his view — to the wolves of party loyalty, ideological fervor, and general calumny?

And yet, and yet. . . . When the chips were down, a fellow East Hamptoner reminded me at a holiday party not long ago, Americans tended in critical moments to put their shoulders to the wheel and to do, in concert, the right thing.

We were talking about countering East Hampton Airport’s pollution (the airport itself being a Depression-era offspring of that can-do spirit), but his assertion can be applied to the amelioration of any number of ills, whether environmental or societal, that cry for attention.

I am an optimist and I believe him, not the dour David. People of good sense will stand up, sweet reason will win the day, that’s my New Year’s prediction.

The day before New Year’s, I found myself wondering if there were resolutions I should make. Perhaps I could come up with something simple, promise myself not to go to bed with dishes in the kitchen sink or lights on in the living room. My husband makes sure the pots and pans are scrubbed before he calls it a day, and as a morning person, I am up and at it early the next day to put them away.

With newfound energy, I look forward to the beginning of a nice day — and The New York Times. Even though I know The Times can be read online, I like finding it on the front lawn. With a cup of coffee in hand, I think of it as a comfortable routine. But as I write this, it is the last day of 2018, and The Times is anything but comforting.

The headlines on the front page read: “C.I.A.’s Afghan Forces Leave a Trail of Abuse and Anger,” “Trump Digs In, Dimming Hope of a Budget Deal,” “Stunning Fall of Nissan’s Brash Savior,” “How a PowerPoint Slide Tangled McKinsey in a U.S. Bribery Case,” and “Cultural Shifts Sweep Away a California Bastion of Conservation.” Nothing positive there.

On most mornings, looking for solace, I turn to nature — the birds and houseplants. The birds are satisfying to take care of, and easy. You keep a feeder full of seed and an eye out to identify what they are, although I have to admit I cannot tell one sparrow-like bird from another. A family member who had not lived on the East Coast before marrying and moving here not only knows them all but can distinguish between the males and females. 

All right, to be honest, I can say I know one cardinal from another. The red males brighten the yard and the subtle, tannish-yellow females are beautiful to see. As for the house plants, I enjoy the almost constant fussing they require. No matter how frequently I tend them, though, there is more to do — a dead leaf I missed on a first foray to be removed, for example, and a plant to be turned so the side that warrants more sun gets it.

I think concentrating on these things instead of the news, or the chores and responsibilities that lie ahead, allows for a good morning. The trouble is that each day brings more than mornings. Ideas and events that do not necessarily bode well have a way of intruding. But let’s forget the news. 

I am counting on the Chinese to set things right. The 4,716th Chinese year begins on Feb. 5, and 2019 is said to be the year of the brown or female earth pig. According to the Chinese, a female pig is a portent of good news. I am hoping she makes the new year one of the best.

A New Year’s resolution may be an indulgence in wish?ful thinking, but I’m determined to fulfill a modest resolution I’ve made for 2019. It’s simple: I am going to sort through my T-shirts and give away most of them. Exactly when I took to buying T-shirts in large numbers is clouded in history. Suffice it to say they come from only two or three retailers and can no longer fit in a bureau drawer, so they clog my closets.

Giving away clothes makes us feel good; we like to spin it as an earth-friendly effort at recycling. (Although, if you have ever seen a good documentary called “T-Shirt Travels” you know how not-so-wonderful the used-clothing trade actually is for local industries in the countries where our castoffs end up, though I guess it might still be better than the landfill.)

Many residents here donate their nicest unwanted clothes to the Bargain Box, the secondhand shop run by the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, which — despite having become quite tony in recent years and not always as big a bargain — is still chockablock with fortuitous fashion finds. Young men of my acquaintance have found perfect tuxedos at the Bargain Box, and there always seems to be a plethora of secondhand designer shoes and outfits.

My daughter tells me she and a close childhood friend had an argument in the Bargain Box’s dress?ing rooms, over Christmas, about a beautiful Carolina Herrera poppy-colored skirt suit with cutout lace trim that was on sale for $10 and probably was originally priced at 200 times that; it didn’t fit either of them, but was too tempting to leave on the rack. (The Herrera suit, I’m told, is currently on a jet plane on its way to Seattle with the victorious childhood friend.)

I am afraid that the staff who manage the Bargain Box would laugh me right out of the building if I showed up with my T-shirts. They would likely suggest I take them to the row of donation bins at the dump, but I am not enthusiastic about that.

Everything that goes into those bins is bundled into bales and resold in less-affluent communities and countries, from the Canadian Maritimes to Zanzibar. No doubt you have seen men, women, and children in faraway places wearing clothes with all kinds of American logos? The reason people on the other side of the world are photographed in Bonac football jerseys and “I’m With Stupid!” T-shirts is because the clothing-bale industry has knocked local fabric and clothing manufacturers right out of business.

I will never forget a jammed, warehouse-like store called Frenchie’s in the small town in Nova Scotia where my daughter used to live; it was stocked entirely with items from these secondhand bales. It was amusing to realize while browsing that all of the clothing, recognizably, had originated from donation bins in the Boston area: In among the woman’s cashmere pullovers from J. Crew and the used lacrosse uniforms, we found a green T-shirt with the logo of Concord Academy, the boarding school in Massachusetts that my daughter attended.

As for the Bargain Box, it has been a year or more, but I remain sorry that the L.V.I.S. decided to stop offering children’s clothes there. Apparently, it just didn’t make economic sense to give over valuable selling-floor space to a kids’ clothing section that didn’t turn much of a profit. Also, I’m told, it was difficult to find reliable volunteers to take on the unglamorous, week-in-week-out task of sorting and pricing things for this particular department.

Still, the fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

It seems to me that a thrift shop is, in this regard, a moral venture. Not only do thrift shops almost invariably benefit charitable causes, and not only do they enable recycling, but they lend a needed hand to those who cannot afford boutique shopping. “Waste not, want not” is indeed a noble dictum. Perhaps someone who reads this — someone with experience in the clothing trade, or a pair of friends — will be inspired to offer their volunteer services to our beloved Bargain Box.

“We’re going to be in for some snow, O’en,” Mary said as we were driving along last Wednesday, before realizing she’d mistaken me for the dog, a good sign.

That she would think to compare me, a Mr. Burns look-alike (in fact, I can rub my hands, and, with a protruding fang, say, “Excellent, excellent” just as he), with such a dignified, snowy-coated beast was comforting, especially in weather that is becoming anything but.

I still worry every now and then, as does she, that we are a bit boring as masters, too old to trot along with him, at least in my case, and too eager to pull the sliding glass door shut when he’s still wanting to chase tennis balls in the frigid gloaming. 

As a ball-chaser he is mercurial. He’ll do it for a while, if he’s pretty sure there’s a treat waiting, in which case he’ll follow the commands — “Bring it . . . Front . . . Sit.” But eventually he’ll get distracted, by a stick, the scent of a mole, or some such, affording us the chance to duck back inside to warm our hands.

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen. Of course, to be fair, there should be lotion Trumpians could apply, too, lest they be irradiated by World Federalists. That having been said, as they say, I found that people were quite friendly when we were in Naples a few years ago, probably because most of the other vacationers we met were from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Canada, where from time to time we say we should move to, if it weren’t so cold, which serves to underline the point I made above. Cold place, warm hearts. Warm place, old farts.

Temperate place, warm hearts and old farts, I guess, which is why we’re still here, engaged in the eternal round of despair and hope, small town contention and amiability. Come to think of it, despair and hope pretty much dominated the conversation at the media forum in Sag Harbor that we went to today. There were challenges to be sure, not the least of which was posed by the perplexing half-done crossword puzzle I’d taken with me, but there was hope too that local news, offered in varying formats, through print, websites, podcasts, and local access television, would remain germane, a future that seemed assured when I arose from the American Hotel table an hour or so later with the puzzle finished in its entirety, usually a sign of good things to come, even if it looked as if we were going to be in for some snow.

Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass. 

I never have to go very far from home to be enlightened.

The temperature had fallen below 20 degrees on Monday when I set out to return a book to the library, and the big question was whether The Star office’s driveway-side door was closer to the library’s front or back door. 

These are the calculations of a senior citizen in winter.

A few months ago, the library installed a handy-dandy beverage machine that grinds and brews a choice of Starbucks coffees, as well as chai and cocoa, which cost only $1 if you take your own mug or $2 if you take a paper cup, and the lure of the coffee machine brought me to the front door of the library. Because it was so cold, I opted for hot chocolate. Continuing my cold-avoidance maneuvers, I walked through the stacks and out the library’s back door to minimize the number of steps back to my desk.

These are the simple pleasures of a senior citizen in winter.

I love going to the library, and very much enjoy its architectural elegance. How lucky we are to have such a well-run and well-supplied institution at the heart of our village.

Being there also gives me an opportunity to glance at a portrait of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, which hangs near the reference desk. As a member of its board of managers, as well as a neighbor, she was a force in the library’s evolution. Indeed, she had grown up in “the Purple House,” which stood between the library and the Star office, where the north wing of the library was constructed in the 1970s. She, like me, made frequent triangular trips between the compass points of home, work, and enlightenment.

The “East Hampton Free Library” had its beginnings at Clinton Academy at the turn of the last century and moved slightly south, nearer Buell Lane, in 1912. Its driving force was a group of 12 local women; its first librarian was Ettie Cartwright Hedges. Interestingly, it was another determined woman, Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse, who donated the land as well as the money to construct the original part of the pretty building, which was meant to look like a timber-frame house in a village in Kent, England, where East Hampton’s original settlers were said to have come from. 

Guild Hall and the John Drew Theater, as well as the Nature Trail, were also gifts to the community from Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse and her husband, Lorenzo.

Last Saturday, I was among the crowd gathered at Guild Hall for a Metropolitan Opera screening of “Adriana Le­couvreur,” starring the marvelous diva Anna Netrebko, and had time to think about the enduring bounty of these Woodhouse gifts. 

What sort of village would we be, without Guild Hall, the library, and the Nature Trail? I know my own everyday life would be much diminished, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column —  midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

It wasn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home, it wasn’t even in the online dictionary that Irene said would save me any more trips to our spine split, dog-eared Webster’s at the edge of Jamie’s desk.

But Mary found it, through Google, the modern equivalent of the Delphic oracle. It’s of “Star Wars” coinage and refers to cells within us that link us to The Force. She liked that idea. We are, then, all one, she said. It would be nice if we were all Obi-Wan too, but alas. Obama’s midichlorian count made Republicans tremble, Maureen Dowd said, until he disarmed them with his professorial side.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s midi­chlorian count has made them tremble too. Not only does she dance, but she thinks the top marginal income tax rate, now at 35 percent, ought to be doubled. Actually, it’s not such a radical idea. That rate was as high as 90 percent in the 1950s, when bottles of milk and clean diapers were delivered to the door, when one wage earner per household largely assured a pleasant life, and when personal incentive remained undampened as far as I know. Google says the top marginal rate even reached 94 percent during World War II.

Given the fact that we’ve been making war on the installment plan for the better part of the past 20 years, it doesn’t seem out of line that the obscenely wealthy who’ve been showered with tax cuts ought to write down the obscene national debt a bit, or at least fortify some bridges. They’re the ones who have been cutting a rug, and have been pulling it out from under the middle class, whose fiscal health is paramount if a democracy is to thrive. So, yes, let’s redress things somewhat. And along that line, I’d like to say that the administration’s assault on SALT (our state and local property tax deductions) is fundamentally a soak the middle class scheme — at least as it concerns many of the half-million Long Island homeowners who itemize — that ought not to stand.  

One wonders what foreigners who hold two-thirds of our national debt might do were they treated by the administration the way those living in New York and California have been. I know, I know, he’s trying.

Warren Buffet has said he owes his wealth, which he intends to give away, essentially to the accident of birth. Ben Franklin said that once one had enough for oneself and one’s family one ought to give the rest back to the country. Teddy Roosevelt in his Progressive Party platform of 1912 advocated for “a single national health service,” inveighed against the unbridled monied interests and unlimited campaign contributions, championed middle-class wage earners, was pro-immigrant, and asserted that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”

“Dismaying,” I can imagine the midichlorian-deprived exclaim as they, like Tolkien’s Gollum, fondle their Rings and whisper, “My precious, my precious.”

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

Going into the day’s excitement, I had told people around the office where I was going to be. To a person, at the words “root canal,” they shuddered or cringed in empathetic fear. 

Though I had undergone the procedure previously, about two years ago on a different molar, I remembered next to nothing, having been entirely whacked-out on laughing gas. At the time, I was worried and agreed when offered the hose end — self-regulated like a hookah. What did I know? I huffed and puffed and pretty soon I was high as a Georgia pie. (Those of you who know the reference will get what I mean.) 

All I can recall from root canal numero uno is that it seemed the same Tom Petty song was playing in the room as I took my first deep inhalation and an hour later, when someone charitably dialed the oxygen ratio back up, and I slowly climbed out of the very deep, black pit in which I had been for the preceding hour. I left my car in the dentist’s parking lot and walked, stumbled really, back to The Star. A week later, I still felt as if I had a hole in my head.

Lucid this time around, the root canal was hardly anything. A little Novocain here or there, maybe 45 minutes of drilling and poking around, and the job was done, hardly worthy of as scary a name as root — dah, dum, dum — canal.

Years ago, one of the New Yorker cartoonists drew a knee-slapper of a page poking fun at the restaurant industry’s effort to rename fish. I don’t remember much other than the concept and the “before” moniker of a made-up fish — the greasy-mouthed bleb. I know, sounds delicious right?

“Greasy-mouthed bleb” has for me become a kind of stand-in for renaming something unappealing to sound a little more appetizing. But though I have thought about this a long time (but actually not so hard), I haven’t come up with much, having learned from the technician exactly what the procedure involves. 

English is full of euphemisms. Panicked house-saving is called “dune restoration.” People don’t die anymore, they “pass.” But root canal? All I have come up with so far is “wallet whacker.”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Imagine. . . .” All the way back in 1963, John Lennon exhorted us to imagine. I’d heard the song — “I’ll Get You,” the B side to “She Loves You” — perhaps a thousand times, but never the way I heard it on Saturday, standing in the subfreezing air with hundreds of others, all of us forming an ever-thickening circle surrounding the mosaic at Strawberry Fields, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

Outside of that tiny section of Central Park, people went about their business, that business apparently the holiday-season orgy of materialism or the enthusiastic annihilation of livers and brain cells, Saturday being the annual SantaCon, an event that the late, great Village Voice once described as “a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.” 

Around that mosaic, though, those hundreds, several of them wielding guitars and a handful of other instruments, were remembering Lennon on the 38th anniversary of his murder. The songs flowed, one after the other, one guitarist or another strumming or singing an introduction in an informal, festive sing-along and celebration of Lennon and the Beatles. 

It’s always so nice to see people of all ages and ethnicities come together, forming a sort of microcosmic New York City within the city, a microcosm of humanity itself, in its collective impulses to gather together and express itself. Better still when the expression is uplifting and positive. All you need is love, love is all you need, was Lennon’s message to the world in 1967. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, he intuited, later that year, with a little help from lysergic acid diethylamide. 

And yet, despite the merry chorus of New Yorkers and visitors to the Capital of the World, where Lennon had persevered, over the strenuous and paranoid protestation of Richard Nixon and his ilk, to become a permanent resident of the city he loved, an overwhelming sadness would not, could not fade away. 

George Harrison, said his widow, Olivia, “was really angry that John didn’t have a chance to leave his body in a better way, because George put so much emphasis and importance on the moment of death, of leaving your body.” 

Lennon was not afforded the luxury of calmly going into the blinding, burning light, mindful that his and the universal mind are one. How could he, with a fan/fanatic squeezing a trigger over and over, shooting holes in his body? 

Nineteen years after Lennon’s murder, the nation was shocked by a mass shooting at a high school in Colorado, two students murdering 12 schoolmates and a teacher. And then, the trickle became a deluge, among the carnage 20 first graders and six adults in Connecticut; 49 killed and 53 wounded inside a nightclub in Orlando, and 58 killed and 851 injured — you read that right — from gunfire and the resulting panic when a gunman opened fire on the crowd at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas. 

This year has been a predictably bloody one in the gun-crazy United States of America. Seventeen more students and teachers were killed, on Valentine’s Day, at a high school in Parkland, Fla. It was the year’s deadliest mass shooting — as of Monday, anyway — but far from the only one. On the 311th day of the year, the 307th mass shooting took place, this time inside a crowded bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Twelve were killed — 13 if you count the shooter, who turned the weapon on himself in the end. 

In a sad but sadly foreseeable irony, some of the patrons enjoying country music at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks had survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas one year before. There are now Americans who have personally experienced two mass shootings. 

According to the John Lennon Official account on Instagram, more than 1.4 million people have been killed by guns in the United States since Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Will we passively bury the bodies, offer our eminently useless thoughts and prayers, and await the next shooting, surely knowing by now that nowhere is safe?

Saturday was so very cold in the park, and I left, after an hour, with Lennon’s words rising from the crowd and into the wintry air. “A very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year / Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

You’d think that a country wanting to be great again would return to what made it great by welcoming those who, having seen the worst of things, are resolved to better their lives. What more worthy goal? 

And yet the pilgrims, who would a century ago have been met in New York Harbor by the Statue of Liberty, are confronted at our southern border by barbed wire and tear gas.

If you want to make America great again, let them in. (In an orderly fashion, of course.) So the parents can work hard and the children can learn. And, perhaps, in their striving they can teach us, who may have forgot why America has for so long been hope incarnate. 

I hope — sense — that, absent disaster, better things will come, despite the divisiveness so evident now. 

It’s the younger generation I’m pinning my hopes on, a generation less in thrall than its elders to ideology, more amenable to working things out. They, I think, will afford genuine opportunity to all, but will insist that our collective health be as paramount as the achievements of each one of us. In other words, I think that we could become a more equitable society, without going to hell in a handbag.

It’s not either the individual or the group — it’s all of us, together. We’ve got to get back to that. To shaking hands rather than turning our backs — or being shot in the back.

It’s not Communism or Socialism that I’m promoting, but amity, Amityism. Can we not think of the welfare of everyone even as we celebrate an individual’s success? Even as we celebrate, even as we delight in, our own voices? 

It’s not all about the money. And the immigrants, who value family above all, know that. It’s about doing one’s best and in doing so contributing to the whole. That’s what made this country great. There is no better society, no better place. Yes, they’re doing great in China, but at the expense of their souls, I think. There is more joy, more potential joy, anyway, in a country where not only initiative but also the freedom to speak one’s mind is equally valued. I don’t envy the Chinese, though to read of that country’s alchemy of coercion and economic uplift is fascinating. 

In the end, though, it is the free and united spirit that will triumph, or ought to triumph. 

So, don’t tear-gas them, let them in.